Someone hands you a gold chain at an estate sale. You find a ring in a drawer that doesn’t look like the others. Before you get attached to a number, it helps to know whether you’re holding gold at all.

None of these tests are conclusive on their own. But together they’ll tell you pretty quickly whether something is worth bringing in.

1. Check for a stamp

Look on the clasp, the inside of a band, or the back of a pendant. Real gold is usually marked: 10K, 14K, 18K, 22K, 24K, or the European equivalents 417, 585, 750, 916, 999.

Watch for letters after the number. GP (gold plated), GF (gold filled), GE or HGE (electroplate), and RGP all mean a thin gold layer over base metal. Those have very little melt value.

A missing stamp doesn’t mean it’s fake — plenty of older and handmade pieces were never marked. And a stamp doesn’t guarantee it’s real either. Counterfeiters stamp things too.

2. The magnet test

Gold is not magnetic. Hold a strong magnet — a refrigerator magnet is too weak, use a neodymium one — near the piece. If it jumps, it isn’t solid gold.

The catch: brass, copper, and aluminum aren’t magnetic either. Passing this test rules out steel-core fakes and nothing else. Clasps and pins are often steel even on genuine gold pieces, so test the body, not the hardware.

3. Look for wear and discoloration

Check edges, high points, and anywhere the piece rubs — the underside of a ring, the back of a clasp. Plating wears through first in those places, showing a different color underneath.

If jewelry has turned your skin green or black, that’s the base metal reacting, not gold.

4. The ceramic test

Drag the piece across the unglazed underside of a ceramic tile or the bottom of a coffee mug. Real gold leaves a gold streak. Fake leaves a black or gray streak.

This works, but it scratches the item. Don’t do it to anything you might want to keep intact.

5. Weigh it against water

Gold is remarkably dense — 19.3 grams per cubic centimeter, nearly twice lead. Weigh the piece, then measure how much water it displaces in a graduated cylinder. Divide grams by milliliters.

A result near 19 suggests high-purity gold. Around 15 suggests 14K. Well under 12 means something else is in there. You need an accurate scale for this to mean anything.

6. What about acid tests?

Acid test kits are sold cheaply and they do work. They also require removing a small amount of metal, involve handling nitric acid, and give misleading results on plated pieces if you don’t scratch deep enough. If you’re testing scrap you don’t care about, fine. For anything you value, skip it.

The test that actually settles it

Every method above has a blind spot. Modern counterfeits are made specifically to pass the easy ones — tungsten has nearly the same density as gold, and plating can be thick enough to survive a scratch.

We use an XRF analyzer, which reads the metal’s exact composition without cutting, scratching, or damaging anything. It takes seconds and tells us precisely what an item is made of and how pure it is.

Bring it by our Fort Worth store and we’ll test it while you wait. There’s no charge and no obligation to sell — plenty of people come in just to find out what they have.